Skype Outage Hits 220 Million Users

[Nomad559]

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article2277632.ece

Skype, the online phone company, was today working to fix an outage that left its 220 million users unable to make cheap calls over the internet.

The company said this morning that it was still working to resolve the problem, which was apparently caused by a fault in its software that means users could not log on to the service.

"It is still too early to call out anything definite yet we are now seeing signs of improvement, and we continue to monitor the situation through Europe waking up this morning," a statement on Skype's blog said.

Skype's chief security officer, Kurt Sauer, told the New York Times that what had happened was caused by "a unique set of events, the genesis of which is not entirely understood".

The flaw existed in every version of the Skype software that had been downloaded since 2003, engineers at the company said, but they were unsure as why the error, which had lain dormant for four years, had only affected the network now.

[JohnyCanuck]

1. Damn

I bought a new Skype phone and was trying to get it to work on my computer yesterday afternoon and was jumping through hoops trying to figure out why my Skype log on was no longer working. Eventually, as a shot in the dark, I called a contact overseas and asked her to try logging on to Skype and she reported she couldn't log on to Skype either, so I figured it must be a Skype problem. I must have wasted about an hour rebooting, retyping passwords and in assorted fiddling around with Skype trying to get it to work when it WASN'T MY PROBLEM. I hate it when that happens. *&$!!^% computers.